Archaeologists from six universities are digging trenches across Queensland to find the “signatures of killings” buried in the earth by the frontline troops of the colonial frontier, the native mounted police.

They have identified 196 distinct camps – sites where, over 50 years, the native police were based while they ranged out to “disperse” Aboriginal people and escort surveyors, pastoralists and prospectors further inland and further north.

“But you have to look at what that ordinariness obscures. The reason they’re there is to support this broad, statewide system of removing any kind of Aboriginal resistance to European expansion. Rather than just looking at it and saying it’s just like any other site, it’s about how that system could function so successfully,” she said.

“By successful, what I mean is that it allowed them to kill more people.”

The native police were a state-sanctioned paramilitary organisation with groups of Aboriginal troopers under the leadership of a white officer.

Historians say troopers were survivors of massacres from their own lands in other parts of the country, recruited by coercion, intimidation, kidnapping and inducement, as well as voluntary enlistment.

L-R The base of a pin fire cartridge, commonly used in breechloading revolvers of the late 1800s, found at Eyre Creek in the channel country; buttons from the uniforms of native police found at a camp at Mistake Creek, central Queensland.

Frontier killings across Queensland were systematic but predominantly of small groups at scattered locations. Archaeologists cannot detect those isolated sites using the usual methods. So, they hit upon the idea of locating native police camps instead.

“The native police proved to be far more interesting than even we knew at the time,” Burke said. “We found descendants of troopers and the survivors of massacres in the same community, even the same family.”

Firsthand accounts from the troopers themselves are absent from the historical record, but the stories told by their descendants form a “complex emotional mosaic”.

“It gets really human and fraught and I never expected that. The knowledge of family involvement in this history can split a family. Some are OK to say they’re descended from that man, other parts refuse to acknowledge. It can cause ongoing issues.

Clockwise from top: A bullet from a Snider-Enfield rifle and the base of a stoneware meat paste jar, both found at Peak Downs native police camp, central western Queensland; a “Josephson’s Australian ointment” lid found at Laura, Cape York. Josephson’s billed itself “a quick and instant relief from pain.”

“The more we talk to people, the more it’s clear they want these stories to get out there. Some white landowners say no, you can’t come on my property but we’ve never had any Aboriginal people say no, you can’t tell the stories,” Burke said.

The more they dig, the more complex the history becomes.

“Some of the really interesting patterns are in those places where we know there was more than one camp over a period of time. Some camps lasted 10 or 20 years, some only one or two years.

“That tells you how much a police presence was needed to facilitate settlement. At Palmer River on Cape York, they had to have repeated camps coming back into the area, because Aboriginal people weren’t ‘pacified’.

“They had areas where they could retreat, mountainous areas, where they couldn’t be followed, where they could hide well.

“But in western Queensland, there were never those sorts of areas. You get a different pattern of peoples’ abilities to resist that force, and you can see that if you plot where the camps are and when the camps are,” Burke said.

Archaeologists are finding domestic debris: bits of pots and plates, occasionally shards of bone, to build a picture of daily life.

“We know there were women and children in those camps as well,” Burke said.

“We’re looking to understand how a unit of native police worked, the demarcation between troopers and white officers, the class division.

Dr Lynley Wallis from the University of Notre Dame, looking at a carte de visite photograph collection of officers and troopers at John Oxley library in Brisbane.

“We’re using the debris to work out how they operated as a social structure, their hierarchy and relationships.”

Two years in and with two years to go, the team has identified 196 sites, done 30 site visits, and excavated at four.

Pinpointing the right place to look requires “a lot of archival research,” Burke said.

“We’ve accessed seven and a half thousand documents from Queensland state archives – old maps, any primary sources we can find – and then we go and talk to people on the ground, historical societies, land owners, Aboriginal communities to try and identify as many places as possible.

“Then we go out and walk the country. If we think the camp is somewhere in a region, we might walk a five kilometre square to try and find it. And we might do that two or three times, just so we can actually locate it. It takes a long time.

“We go out and walk the country.” Excavations from above at Burke River, near Boulia in southwest Queensland, Australia.

The names of waterholes, mountains and other landmarks can reveal what happened there.

“You go to a site called ‘Murdering Lagoon’ and that has a story attached to it, of a massacre of course. Not all place names are about killing Aboriginal people but one of the things about the topography of Australia is that there are lots of names like that and you wouldn’t ignore that.”

The project winds up in 2020 with a plan to make public as much information as possible, and in the hope that the sites will be seen as worth preserving.

“Native police camps are almost always known at the local level by historical societies and passionate local historians, but none of them are listed on the state heritage resister,” Burke said.

“There’s a long history of the state not wanting to acknowledge that it was a state sponsored act.

A petition from the lessees of crown lands in the districts of Kennedy north and Cook to the Commissioner of Police in Brisbane, seeking native police reinforcement because “the depredations by the blacks on our stock are excessive”.

“The history of the native police is so complex. It’s not just a black and white thing. People need to put together the parts of the story themselves, to figure out what they feel about it.”